ADDITIONAL NOTES:completed airing its first season on 6/18/17; has yet to be renewed for a second season

DESCRIPTION:(from Smithsonian Channel's press release, May 2017) America's conquest of space may be our nation's finest moment. But behind the faces of fearless astronauts like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin and a crusading president stood an army of unsung heroes and heroines: the engineers, mathematicians, designers and technicians who actually built the machines that put humanity in space. AMERICA'S SECRET SPACE HEROES unearths the untold stories of the space program - from the men and woman who created everything from the Saturn V moon rocket to the first successful Mars lander. AMERICA'S SECRET SPACE HEROES premieres on Smithsonian Channel on Sunday, May 14 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. This brand new six-part series explores some of the world's greatest space endeavors through the firsthand accounts of NASA's engineering geniuses. These incredible minds turned science fiction into reality, taking on the job of building rockets, landers, satellites and everything else NASA needed to conquer space. The astronauts won the glory, but AMERICA'S SECRET SPACE HEROES reveals the men and women who quietly overcame unprecedented challenges to create the lunar lander, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, the Hubble Telescope, and the spacecraft that started the march to Mars.